•L CON, The Ballad Project (Daps). Lisa Conway’s voice has been a fixture — and I mean a fixture — in the background of my daily life for pretty much a year straight now thanks to her dominating presence on noir-ish local ensemble Del Bel’s brilliant 2011 LP, Oneiric, and Chrome and the Ice Queen’s Diane, a Twin Peaks-checkin’ semi-sequel to that frustratingly under-acknowledged album that she and DB composer Tyler Belluz issued online early last spring.

Conway’s debut solo EP as L CON, The Ballad Project, only lays further bare her talents as a tormented David Lynch dream of a nightclub siren pitched somewhere between the Peggy Lee who gave us “Is That All There Is?” and Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, while also announcing the classically trained songstress as a gifted arranger capable of a wrangling a 14-piece string section into appropriately John Barry-esque shape behind her. Artfully spooky orchestral-pop sadness with a poise and classy veneer that feels beamed in from the black-and-white era. I am a huge fan of this gal. L Con plays Cinecycle on Nov. 24.

•Have Not Been the Same (Pheromone). The book version is an exhaustive and indispensable tome by Jason Schneider, Ian A.D. Jack and Michael Barclay first published in 2001 that detailed the maturation of Canadian rock ’n’ roll before the subsequent, post-millennial re-maturation of CanCon that brought the rest of the world on board. Recently granted a much-deserved reprint via ECW Press, the dense text now has a similarly essential audio companion.

This collects seldom-heard tunes by homegrown acts who laid smashing stuff to tape during the bleed years between the mid-’80s and the mid-’90s and yet remain largely uncelebrated by anyone who didn’t have the good fortune to keep up with The New Music or CBC’s Brave New Waves at the time. Schneider talks in the liner notes about having his life changed by Slow’s “Have Not Been the Same” — “a song that jolted me out of my teenage malaise, especially when I realized I couldn’t buy the record anywhere or hear it on the radio” — after chancing across it on MuchMusic in 1985.

I feel compelled to add that I, too, would never have thought of pursuing a career in music journalism had the Doughboys, the Nils, Change of Heart, NoMeansNo, A Neon Rome, Crash Vegas, Jr. Gone Wild, the Pursuit of Happiness, Weeping Tile and the rest of the acts featured here not alerted me to a world of bafflingly inaccessible awesomeness at my doorstep at the same, impressionable time. This is where Canadian indie-rock as we know it and the labels, promoters and critics who now fly its flag come from. No foolin’.

All proceeds from sales of the Have Not Been the Same compilation go to Kids Help Phone, too, so you’re not only educating yourself when you buy it, you’re doing a generation of kids in distress a solid. There’s an auction, too, of the artists’ memorabilia and personal items like Bobby Wiseman’s old Acetone keyboard; see here for more.

•King Cobb Steelie, Project Twinkle (Pheromone). Funny to think that Project Twinkle met with some grumpiness amongst King Cobb Steelie fans and not a little public second-guessing by members of King Cobb Steelie itself in the wake of its original release in 1994, because it sounds oddly right-on-time for a record celebrating its 18th birthday in 2012.

The tide of the times has lately cycled hipster-dom back around to sounds that orbit in the vicinity of the nifty stuff these stylistically omnivorous Guelph groove-rockers and highfalutin’ producer Bill Laswell got up to together on Twinkle, but King Cobb Steelie remains a one-of-a-kind deal. Even the bits of Project Twinkle that could be accused of dating a bit — the elongated, scritchy-scratchy funk-punk throwdowns “Triple Oceanic Experience” and “The Pollinator,” for instance — arguably hold up better than similar-sounding stuff from the period by, say, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or I Mother Earth.

The dubbier stuff sounds fantastic here, rich in high-end detail and pulsing with monstrous sub-bass. Bonus points for the brain-ticklin’ Mad Professor remix of “Italian UFOlogy Today,” not to mention the other UFO reference in the album title. We like that kinda stuff. King Cobb Steelie plays Project Twinkle back-to-front at the Horseshoe Tavern on Nov. 29.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.